[Development] Naming of path/directory-related environment variables in Qt
Matthew Woehlke
mwoehlke.floss at gmail.com
Fri Nov 11 17:10:11 CET 2016
On 2016-11-11 10:13, Mitch Curtis wrote:
> I'd like to establish some kind of convention for naming
> path/directory-related environment variables in Qt, with the hope
> that it could be set in stone with e.g. one of these newfangled
> QUIPs. [...] So, can we all agree on using "PATH" when naming
> environment variables that refer to paths?
I believe that `FOO_DIR` is typical for variables that name a *single*
directory. For multiple directories, XDG prefers `FOO_DIRS`, but
otherwise `FOO_PATH` seems most common.
Examples:
PATH (duh)
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PYTHONPATH
LUA_PATH
QT_PLUGIN_PATH
LIBPATH
COMPILER_PATH
LIBRARY_PATH
CPATH
C_INCLUDE_PATH
CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH
TMPDIR
KDEDIRS
XDG_DATA_DIRS
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
I think a good rule would be single directories should use _DIR if
anything (some cases e.g. HOME may be exceptions), and list of
directories should use _PATH.
Please don't use `FOO_FOLDER` :-).
--
Matthew
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